New Media Expert Clay Shirky to Speak at Bennington

Mar 30, 2010

Author, consultant, and educator Clay Shirky, an expert on the social and economic effects of Internet technologies, will speak on "Motivation in a Connected Age" on Monday, April 5, at 7:00 pm in the College's Tishman Lecture Hall. The event is free and open to the public.

"Why are people online doing all that work for free?" Shirky asks. "What motivates people to add video to YouTube, contribute to Wikipedia, write open source software, and even share their medical details? Much of the confusion over generous behavior online comes from a misreading of human motivation as principally selfish when, in fact, our social motivations can be just as powerful as our personal ones."

Since 1996, Shirky has written extensively about the Internet in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Harvard Business Review, and Wired, among other leading publications. A teacher in New York University's Interactive Telecommunications program, his most recent book, Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing without Organizations, was named one of the "Best Innovation and Design Books of 2008" by Businessweek Magazine.